Thursday, September 10, 2015

corbyn and conditions

Another day, another prediction in the British press that Corbyn will lead to the end of labour, or massive losses in 2020, or tory heaven. Whatever.
It is an amazing spectacle. Three months ago, not one of the people who are gifting us with their predictions of what is going to happen in five months was able to predict what was going to happen in three months. Back in those rosy days, the press pundits in the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, etc. were all busy wondering whether Kendall was going to carry the day. Maybe it would be exciting Andy Burnham, New Labour's plastic man!
But ignoring past failure is a prerequisite for future prediction among the press set.
So polls that are more like focus groups are wheeled out, from the usual suspects. And the pundits have settled down to learn nothing from their experience, as is their wont.
What is to be learned from their experience for the rest of us? Let's take a grab at the obvious.
All the establishment actually believes that current conditions will continue indefinitely. They have not only bought the idea of austerity as one that can be sold to the people, they believe it will actually bring about economic security to their own type, The "poor" will be disadvantaged, and the press establishment that pretends to pinkish tendencies often cries crocodile tears over the fact that Labour, disempowered under the British Fidel Corbyn Castro, will make Labour unable to achieve the power to help the disadvantaged. The pinkish tinge, nowadays, means entirely forgetting how the middle class was built, as well as the fact that the "poor" are actually working class, part of the machine that produces surplus labour value that drifts to the capitalist. Instead, being pinkish means asserting a sort of charitable impulse in the busy elite, while allowing them to get on with producing a more and more glorious speculative sector.
Well, in five years, perhaps the austerity of the Tories will bring prosperity to the average British household. But perhaps, in five years, Britain will have to pay the price for having fed a swollen financial sector while neglecting everything else except arms sales. Here's a scenario: China and India stumble. The business cycle god does not suspend history even for such upward strivers. This spreads alarm in the financial sectors, such that there is another financially caused recession. The tories continue, as they almost must, their insande austerity fetishism. The UK unemployment rate, which is currently a cool 5.5 percent, nearly doubles to 10 percent. Corbyn, who has adopted a tone of opposition such that the Tories have publicized it, now stands as the man who said austerity would ultimately make things worse - and as the man warning against an economy that is supported by a swollen financial sector.
Labour might still lose, but the Tories would be in pretty bad shape under this not so fantastic scenario.
The press establishment is still living in the 90s, still thinking there is no alternative when the alternative they have chosen has already led to disaster in 2008. Of course, they neither predicted that disaster nor actually experienced it, as is their wont.
I would not put too much trust in whatever they write. They live in shells, like oysters, but unlike oysters, they rarely produce a pearl.

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